357. The Social Environment Defining Deviance

The Social Environment Defining Deviance

In recent years, more and more syndromes and disorders have been defined and used to label people with behavior deviant from the expectations in their social environment.   The recent addition of NLD is an example and in entry 356 I have been wondering, if NLD is just another label for intellectual immaturity hidden behind verbal proficiency.    Therefore, when I use the word immaturity in the remainder of this entry, it will include NLD together with psychosocial and intellectual immaturity.  

There are two possible hypotheses concerning the potential for maturity as defined in entry 356.  

1. Every person is born with the potential for developing full psychosocial and intellectual maturity indicated by full consequencity and freedom from gullibility, according to the present day evolution of the brain.  
   Only a fraction of all people does ever realise this full potential.   Not reaching it is a result of external circumstances like lacking access to resources, psychological and social influences, challenges and limitations, physical harm and health problems.
2. The innate potential of the possible maximal maturity to be reached under optimal circumstances is distributed along a bell curve as are other traits like body size and talents.    

Most plausible is a combination of both, but the second hypothesis probably has a limited scope of variability, while the first one can have more drastic impacts.


There are different social environments in regard to the importance of maturity: 

1. Maturity is neither required, enabled nor empowered for the majority of the population.   Their potential maturity remains hidden.    Circumstances allowing and enabling full maturity are a privilege of a minority.  
2. Reaching maturity is expected from everybody and required from the majority.    The lacking or loss of the potential is considered as a deficit and called immaturity.  

Environment 1: 
During millenia of human history, life was organized mainly in villages and small towns, tribes, guilds, nomadic hordes, hoods.  Under their circumstances, maturity was obsolete and not reached.   
Psychosocial maturity is only needed to make wise choices, when there are options and the freedom to select one.    In those heavily structured communities, people's behavior was and is determined by strict rules, enforced by anything between exclusion, expulsion, deprivation from help and drastic punishments.   
Intellectual maturity is not needed in situations, where most of the activities for survival are manual labor and simple routines.  Tiresome toiling in the fields or simple crafts of making pots, baskets or building huts does not lead to someone ever reaching the limits of his abstract abilities, no matter how high or low they are.

Environment 2:
Since the industrial revolution and the advancement of technology, and since the widespread availability of tv and the web, the situation has been reversed.  
Psychosocial maturity: Children are already so overflowed and desensitized with oversexation and violence during the most susceptible phase of gullibility.  By the time, when their brain is ready for developing maturity, they are already too emotionally crippled and dwarfed and their potential to ever reach maturity is severely damaged.  
Intellectual maturity:   Everyday life has lately reached a complexity of ubiquitous technology.  Those with a lower potential for intellectual maturity are noticed and considered as deviant.  They are given labels like NLD.   In a rural society in historical times, they would have been shepherds or farm hands, and nobody would have seen them as having a disorder.